I'm trying to create a partition for Windows, but I'm getting the message "disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved." A poster in another thread concerning this problem said that to create a partition, Bootcamp needs continuous space or something. I do have many large files, and I had up to 3 GB free out of 180 a few minutes ago until I deleted some files to get about 58 GB. I tried partitioning with 45 GB and got the error message. I also tried lower numbers, but nothing worked. I'm assuming it's because my files are fragmented. Then I looked up defragment in the forums and found that many people are against it whether it's because it "slows down the computer" or "it is unnecessary." Now I'm in a bind because I don't want to reinstall my OS, but now I'm hearing I shouldn't defrag either. Can I get some solutions?
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Defrag or Don't?
- Thread starter Gattz
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use NTFS instead of FAT
FAT, even though you can simply drag and drop things (with tinkering you can do that in NTFS), you can only have a max of 32 gb of space (and you cant have files larger than 4gb)
with NTFS, there is no limit, and you can easily send things from your mac partition to your windows partition using something called NTFS 3G. look that up.
FAT, even though you can simply drag and drop things (with tinkering you can do that in NTFS), you can only have a max of 32 gb of space (and you cant have files larger than 4gb)
with NTFS, there is no limit, and you can easily send things from your mac partition to your windows partition using something called NTFS 3G. look that up.
I had that problem, and I tried defragging the drive, but it didn't work for me. So I wiped my hard drive, made two partitions, and restored one with my Time Machine backup and installed XP on the other.
YOU do not need to defrag. This is a COMMON error that has existed since bootcamp.
You need to simply Repair Disk, but to do so you need to boot from recovery / install dvd.
Simply boot your mac from the recovery disc. Once recovery/install disc is started you do not install, choose DISK UTILITY from the utilites menu.
Choose repair disk.
Once repaired, reboot and you will now be able to partition for bootcamp.
Nothing to do with defragmenting anything........
Strange. Are you sure it was a repair disk and not repair permissions ?
Looks like bootcamp should never have left out of beta!
Repairing the Disk isn't going to resolve the cannot partition error. That only shows up when you don't have enough contiguous free space in order to create a partition of the size that you want.
You can either defrag HFS+ to free up a space large enough to partition off or reinstall/restore/reimage OS X.
You can try a smaller partition size as well.
I had this EXACT same problem with bootcamp a few weeks ago. I tried to repair it, and that didn't help. I couldn't get iDefrag burnt on to a cd, so instead i backed up with Time Machine and did a complete reinstall. I know it seems like a hassle, but if you use time machine, its a two hour painless free process. My computer is now way faster, and i could install windows easily
I don't have an external HD though. I also read something in Disk Utility called Erase Free Space. It says that it is for security reasons so that the files cannot be recovered, but my first question is if they are replacing the unused space with zeroes, how is doing it more than once any different from just once? 2) Is this similar to defragging in that I can have real free space?